Skip to main contentrtttttt Skip to main content
Integrative Psychiatry

What is Posttraumatic Growth?

Often the journey toward psychological wellbeing involves navigating trauma and its aftermath. Amidst the deep wounds of trauma, there exists a potential to harness profound healing processes that support beneficial changes to self-concept and meaning-making, called posttraumatic growth. 

Posttraumatic growth refers to the compassion-oriented psychological changes that might be experienced following trauma, such as acceptance or gratitude for self. This type of transformation is not easy; it is not a positive psychology spin on trauma or a spiritual bypass to healing. Posttraumatic growth takes a lot of hard work, confrontation, discomfort, and cultivation of self love. Its arrival is marked by an embodied experience that is associated with the development of personal resilience, shifts in perspective, spirituality, and connection with others.

Existential and Humanistic Roots

The conceptual seeds of posttraumatic growth find fertile ground in existential and humanistic therapies. Existential approaches emphasize the exploration of life’s meaning and the freedom to make choices, even in the face of adversity. Victor Frankl’s contributions to this field, including his book Man’s Search for Meaning, emphasize inner freedom amidst suffering. Humanistic approaches highlight a client’s innate tendency towards self-actualization. Posttraumatic growth aligns with these frameworks by acknowledging the potential for growth and meaning-making inherent in human experiences.

Supporting Posttraumatic Growth in Clinical Practice

Developing Therapeutic Alliance: Establish real, open dialogue with compassion and empathy about the entirety of the client’s human experience (cognitive, emotional, somatic, and spiritual) to create a safe and trusting environment where clients feel understood and validated.

Reconstructing Narratives: Help clients construct a narrative of their trauma and resulting experiences. By revisiting and reframing their stories, individuals might discover new perspectives, insights, and concepts about themselves.

Facilitating Meaning-Making: Explore the existential questions that arise. Assist them in finding meaning in their experiences or integrating the parts of themselves that feel connected to the trauma wound. 

Embracing Spirituality: For many individuals, spirituality is a source of life force energy. Integrate spiritual practices or rituals into therapy to honor psychological transitions and transformations and to support clients’ connection with themselves, others, and the world.

Nurturing Self-Compassion: Encourage self-compassion and the welcoming of all parts. Help clients cultivate a gentle and non-judgmental attitude towards themselves, holding both their pain and resilience through this process.

Cultivating Resilience: Teach coping skills and grounding strategies to assist clients as they go through inevitable challenges in and out of the therapy office. Mindfulness practices, relaxation techniques, somatic resourcing, and cognitive-behavioral interventions can support emotional tolerance and regulation. 

Conclusion

Posttraumatic growth requires deep processing of wounds, working from a holistic standpoint that integrates mind-body-spirit. Understanding that change is imperfect and rhythmic, not a stagnant finish line, therapeutic interventions that inspire posttraumatic growth can help clients connect with themselves in restorative ways, beyond symptom management.

Sara Reed, MS, LMFT

Sara Reed is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and CEO of Mind’s iHealth Solutions, a digital health company that provides evidence based and culturally responsible mental health services for underserved groups. As a mental health futurist and clinical researcher, Sara examines the ways culture informs the way we diagnose and treat mental illness. Sara’s prior research work includes participation as a study therapist in psychedelic therapy research at Yale University and the University of Connecticut’s Health Center. Sara was the first Black therapist to provide MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in a clinical trial and continues to engage in ongoing advocacy work around health equity in psychedelic medicine.

https://psychiatryinstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Jeffrey-Guss.png

Jeffrey Guss, MD is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and researcher with specializations in psychoanalytic therapy and the treatment of substance use disorders. He was Co-Principal Investigator and Director of Psychedelic Therapy Training for the NYU School of Medicine’s study on psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy in the treatment of cancer-related existential distress, which was published in Journal of Psychopharmacology, 2016. He currently is a study therapist in the NYU study on Psychedelic-Assisted therapy in the treatment of Alcoholism, a collaborator with Yale University’s study on psychedelic-assisted therapy for Major Depressive Disorder and a study therapist with the MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) study on treatment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder with Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy. 

Dr. Guss is interested in the integration of psychedelic therapies with contemporary psychoanalytic theory and has published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality and Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He has published (with Elizabeth Nielson, PhD) a paper on “the influence of therapists’ first had experience with psychedelics on psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy research and therapist training” in The Journal of Psychedelic Studies, August, 2018. He is an Instructor and Mentor with the California Institute of Integral Studies’ Center for Psychedelic Therapies and Supervisor in NYU’s Fellowship in Addiction Psychiatry. 

Dr. Guss maintains a private practice in New York City.

Will Van Derveer, MD

Will Van Derveer, MD is Co-Founder of Integrative Psychiatry Institute and Integrative Psychiatry Centers. Dr. Van Derveer was co-investigator on a phase 2 MAPS study of Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy for treatment-resistant PTSD, and co-authored the publication of this study in 2018. He has also provided Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy in two MAPS training studies. An active provider of KAP at his clinic in Boulder, CO, he has been teaching others KAP therapy for several years. Dr. Van Derveer contributed a chapter on mescaline in the 2021 "Handbook of Medical Hallucinogens" (edited by Charles Grob and Jim Grigsby). He is co-host of the Higher Practice Podcast.

Dr. Van Derveer regards unresolved emotional trauma as the most significant under-recognized root cause of psychiatric symptoms in integrative psychiatry practice, along with gut issues, hormone imbalances, inflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction, and other functional medicine challenges. He is trained in Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, Internal Family Systems, and other psychotherapy techniques. His current clinical passion is psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, which he mentors interested doctors in providing. An avid meditator, he has been a meditation instructor since 2004.

For the past several years Dr. Van Derveer has taught psychiatrists and other psychiatric providers integrative psychiatry in a number of settings, including course directing the CU psychiatry residents’ course as well as with Scott Shannon and Janet Settle at the Psychiatry MasterClass.


Scott has been a student of consciousness since his honors thesis on that topic at the University of Arizona in the 1970s under the tutelage of Dr. Andrew Weil. Following medical school, Scott studied Jungian therapy and acupuncture while working as a primary care physician in a rural area for four years. Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy became a facet of his practice before this medicine was scheduled in 1985. He then completed a psychiatry residency at Columbia program in New York. Scott studied cross-cultural psychiatry and completed a child/adolescent psychiatry fellowship at the University of New Mexico.

In 2010 he founded Wholeness Center in Fort Collins. This innovative clinic provides cross-disciplinary evaluation and care for all mental health concerns. Scott serves as a site Principal Investigator and therapist for the Phase III trial of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD sponsored by (MAPS). He has also published numerous articles about his research on (CBD) in mental health. Currently, Scott works extensively with psychedelic-assisted-psychotherapy. He lectures all over the world to professional groups interested in a deeper look at mental health issues, safer tools, and a paradigm-shifting perspective about transformative care.

Will Van Derveer, MD is co-founder of Integrative Psychiatry Institute (IPI), along with friend and colleague Keith Kurlander, MA. He co-created IPI as an expression of what he stands for. First, that anyone can heal, and second that we medical providers must embrace our own healing journeys in order to fully command our potency as healers.

Dr. Van Derveer spent the last 20 years innovating and testing a comprehensive approach to addressing psychiatric challenges which transcends the conventional model he learned in medical school at Vanderbilt University and residency at University of Colorado, while deeply engaging his own healing path.

He founded the Integrative Psychiatric Healing Center in in 2001 in Boulder, CO, where he currently practices. Dr. Van Derveer regards unresolved emotional trauma as the most significant root cause of psychiatric symptoms in integrative psychiatry practice, along with gut issues, hormone imbalances, inflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction, and other functional medicine challenges. He is trained in Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, Internal Family Systems, and other psychotherapy techniques. His current clinical passion is psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, which he mentors interested doctors in providing. An avid meditator, he has been a meditation instructor since 2004.

For the past several years Dr. Van Derveer has taught psychiatrists and other psychiatric providers integrative psychiatry in a number of settings, including course directing the CU psychiatry residents’ course as well as with Scott Shannon and Janet Settle at the Psychiatry MasterClass. In addition to his clinical work and teaching, he was co-investigator in 2016 a Phase II randomized clinical trial, sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). He continues to support this protocol, now in a Phase III clinical trial under break-through designation by FDA.

Dr. Van Derveer is a diplomate of the American Board of Integrative and Holistic Medicine (ABoIHM) since 2013, and he was board certified in the first wave of diplomates of the new American Board of Integrative Medicine (ABIM) in 2016.